Planner-Org Freundschaft
Planner Org Freundschaft
POF is a bunch of settings and some code to help me convert Planner files to Org files. These are my notes about using POF as well as background about my planning habits.
background
Planner1 has served me well for many years. Now I need a couple of Org2 features so I'm converting my Planner directory to Org. Both systems are based on Outline mode, so conversion isn't too painful so far.
I have used a loose text file system since the mid-nineties. Many of those files were never converted properly to Planner. This means that pof has a lot of code geared towards converting badly formated files to Org.
For some forgotten reason I found it amusing to write my very early notes as letters to myself, and use "findings" in the file names.
Earlier than the Findings system I used up a lot of paper doing research notes and stuff. I use my Emsane.el3 project to scan these notes.
99.99% of my many amazing plans never come to fruition but writing down ideas at least lets me move on to other ideas rather than having random stuff bouncing about in my brain. I use note-writing as a kind of swap-space one might say.
Spending too much time planning rather than producing is essentialy a form of procrastination. I use my zen-mode.el4 project to manage other forms of procrastination and try to accept planning as the least wasteful form.
Another thing that always frustrated me with Planner was the lack of a visual mind-map overview. I use my project Inkmacs5 for that now.
Why Org over planner then?
At the outset I just needed property drawers for my Inkmacs5 project. I was quite wary of converting because I thought Planner served me quite well. In the end it became an interesting challenge and so far I've been able to convert incrementally slowly gaining new improvements in my planning workflow.
converting Planner tasks to Org todos
(global-set-key [f6] 'pof-convert-next-planner-task)
It tries its best to figure out closing dates for closed tasks but often it has to guess. If the close dates are important to you be extra vigilant in checking the dates.
also note that there is a difference between converting on a day page or a project page.
merging many org files
There didn't seem to be any support in Org to merge files: http://www.mail-archive.com/emacs-orgmode@gnu.org/msg36652.html
Im not so concerned with performance but I do want a structure that is easy to navigate. The Planner structure I have has too many files and I need to merge a number of them in a controlled manner.
I use pof-merge-dired-files for my merges. I select files in dired and select the output buffer. Input files are demoted before the merge. Headers are constructed so the structure isn't lost.
day pages
ive got so many day pages now so ins unwieldy. they shall be converted to org and merged.
This went rather well with pof-merge-dired-files and some of the cleanup support I made. Its a lot of manual work but not too bad even for 2K files.
what to merge?
its kind of difficult to see how to convert my existing structure to org. With planner i had gazilionz of rathr unstructured files and used rgrep a lot. this works surprisingly well. its not hard to enter information and its not hard to find, to a point.
with org im aiming to improve the hierarchichal dimension and use tags for the linking.
i still find it pretty agonizing to merge files. not because its difficult but because its hard to decide the hierarchies.
more priorities
In planner I used priorities ABC. I wound up with too much being priority A. With Org I changed to allow more priorities then I down shifted all task priorities one step with this macro: <S-down> ;; org-shiftdown <down>
Then I shifted up the few real A tasks I have.
calendar
im used to keeping my schedule in planner day pages. sooo org-agenda-diary-file should point to journal.org?
importing icalendar events from emails seem to require to use the diary file as well. hmm.
in org you can scedule a meeting in any file.
agenda auxiliary information
An agenda can be seen as an aid for making decisions. Your schedule and task priorities are useful information. Sometimes it is useful to knew other things in order to set priorities.
- How much money you have on the bank can be interesting in order to know if you can place that order you planned
- The weather might affect your day planning
- Your location might decide what errands to do
DONE motd
I usually have a scary motd in my todo list "TIME IS RUNNING OUT". I implemented it for my custom org agenda with pof-agenda-motd. So, a fortune so I'm motivated to read the agenda, then the scariness.
- DONE TIME IS RUNNING OUT
- DONE motd rather than moving forward motivational task
TODO financial agenda
Inspired by the easy setup of my custom agenda I want a financial agenda that will show financial todos and also show account balances. Of course banks don't offer convenient API:she by default but I had success with reading the expense account other work at least. I think bank account information can be scraped anyway.
TODO location
query the gps and match task tags
TODO weather
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsWeather shew weather in block agenda
random things I had somewhat working in Planner
TODO emms org integration
literate dj. its simply a playlist in org format.
TODO org erc
TODO org pdf
TODO jdbc urls
Emacs address books
there are many options. ive been usin bbdb together with planner a lot but its not shiny anymore, and it cant be included in Emacs. IMHO it would be nice if ot least abook and org-contacts could cooperate.
org addressbook
keep contacts in an org file. this solution seems very interesting. http://julien.danjou.info/org-contacts.html
it would be nice to be able to keep contacs in the different project files because i do that a lot already because of old habits. but sadly it seems too slow to use org-contacts this way. A compromise might be possible by making an explicit list of files to search by greping the org files once in a while.
TODO convert bbdb to org
could maybe be done with a customer bbdb layout
abook
use standard vcards which is nice.
bbdb
DONE add bbdb on outgoing email
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/emacs/moy-bbdb.el
DONE org-emmental.el
remember webcam snapshots in org with capture.
TODO git backup of org
a magit approach
see (pof-org-checkin )
a shell script
http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#sec-18_1 #!/bin/sh
REPOS="org doc.norang.ca www.norang.ca"
for REPO in $REPOS do echo "Repository: $REPO" cd ~/git/$REPO
git ls-files --deleted -z | xargs -0 git rm >/dev/null 2>&1
git add . >/dev/null 2>&1
git commit -m "$(date)"
done
.gitignore core core.* *.html ~ .# \#*\# *.txt *.tex *.aux *.dvi *.log *.out *.ics *.pdf *.xml *.org-source *.png *.toc